Monday, 18 December 2017

I am concerned that we are throwing knee-touching into the same
basket as rape, which does a grievous disservice to mere knee-touchers
and rape victims both. I am concerned that we are increasingly wont to
confuse genuine abuse of power in the workplace with often distant
memories of men who have made failed – ‘unwanted’ – passes. In the
complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the way
one conventionally discovers if one’s attraction is returned is to brave
some gentle physical contact and perhaps accept rebuff. Were I still a
young woman looking for a partner, I would not wish to live in world
where a man had to secure a countersigned contract in triplicate before
he kissed me.

I am concerned that we are casting women as irremediably scarred by
even minor, casual advances, and as incapable of competently and
sensitively handling the commonplace instances in which men are drawn to
them sexually and the feeling doesn’t happen to be mutual.

I am concerned that sex itself seems increasingly to be seen as
dirty, and as a violation, a form of assault, so that we’re repackaging
an old prudery in progressive wrapping paper. I am concerned that we are
well on our way to demonising, if not criminalising, all male desire.

Turbocharged by social media, #MeToo may have gone too far. Rather
than bringing the sexes together with improved mutual understanding, we
are in danger of driving the sexes apart. If I were a man right now, I’d
lock the door of my study with the intention of satisfying myself with
internet porn for the indefinite future. Real women would not seem worth
the risk of destroying my career. Is that what we want?

Christina Hoff Sommers says…
The #MeToo movement seems to be devolving into an anti-male
grievance-fest. Veteran journalist Lucinda Franks now claims ‘gender
degradation’ irreparably harmed her career, but it’s hard to see the
impact that sexual harassment had on a decorated reporter, who was the
youngest person ever to win a Pulitzer. A Glamour writer has described a ‘spectre of fear’ haunting all working women in ‘every interaction’.

Reality check: American women – especially those in the
professional/managerial class – are among the freest and most
self-determining human beings on the planet. They may run into the
occasional troglodyte, but overall, they are not merely doing as well as
men – they are starting to surpass them. According to a recent survey
of hiring data, young women are starting to out-earn young men. Women
now earn most of the advanced degrees – including doctorates. The
women’s advocacy group Catalyst reports that as of 2015, ‘women held
51.5 per cent of all management, professional, and related occupations’.

Gender scholars don’t dispute these findings. But they maintain that
the patriarchy, in a desperate effort to hold on to power, is acting out
in lurid ways. The evidence suggests otherwise. The General Social
Survey is one of the most trusted sources of data in the social
sciences. In 2014, a random sample of Americans was asked a
straightforward question: ‘In the last 12 months, were you sexually
harassed by anyone while you were on the job?’ Only 3.6 per cent of
women said yes. That is down from 6.1 per cent in 2002. The patriarchy
is well past its prime.

Powerful men are falling left and right – but not because women are
second-class citizens. Just the opposite. Girl Power is real. Instead of
carrying on about how frightened and degraded we are, maybe it’s time
to acknowledge the truth: in 2017, we can destroy almost any man by a
single accusation.
With power comes responsibilities. As Wesley Yang said, in the best
article yet on the #MeToo frenzy: ‘Feminists should remember something
they know well from their own experiences with men: nobody is so
dangerous, to themselves and others, as a person or collectivity that
wields power without acknowledging it.’

Christina is an author, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and host of The Factual Feminist.

Nathalie Rothschild says…
Why is the #Metoo campaign worrying? It is hard to know where to begin.
I could discuss how it is normalising the kind of mob behaviour that
is the most negative aspect of internet culture, and how it is eroding
the presumption of innocence.
I could mention how the insistence that men are complicit in
perpetuating a ‘rape culture’ characterised by a ‘continuum of abuse’ –
running from lockerroom banter to gang rape – demonises half the world’s
population and relativises, and therefore trivialises, sexual violence.
I could argue that it poisons relations between the sexes, turning everyday interactions into a social minefield.

I could focus on the censorious impulse behind #MeToo. ‘Outed’
celebrities and their work are denounced as ‘degenerate’ and erased,
much like ‘unacceptable’ material was shoved down the memory hole in
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I could discuss how #MeToo marks a return to puritanism, and revives a
Victorian view of women as actual or potential victims of sexual
assault and therefore in need of shielding.
But perhaps the most disturbing element of #MeToo is how it has
transmogrified into a kind of confession competition. The more gruesome a
woman’s testimonial is, the more sympathy she is likely to get from the
online sisterhood.

The idea that the moments in our lives when we felt power was
exercised upon us should be those that mark us and define us forever
runs counter to the view of women as active, autonomous agents. And it
is that view which ought to define the experience of being a woman in
the 21st century.

Nathalie is a print and broadcast journalist based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Wendy Kaminer says…
#MeToo is the unthinking woman’s anti-harassment crusade. It commands
us to ‘believe the women’ unthinkingly, without considering the
seriousness or plausibility of their claims. It calls every accuser a
survivor, whether she alleges a sexual assault or a single, unsolicited
advance. It ignores essential differences between work-related
harassment that undermines women professionally and inconsequential
social annoyances, threatening to police interpersonal relations outside
the workplace. It celebrates conformity and demonises dissent, as you
might expect from a movement based on proclamations of ‘me too’.

Thinking people make distinctions – between a hand on your knee and a
grope up your skirt, between a sexual attack by a supervisor and a pat
on the butt from a guy in a bar – just as they distinguish pickpockets
from home invaders. #MeTooism condemns such distinctions as reflections
of rape culture. At best, when we differentiate ‘sexual assault and
sexual harassment and unwanted groping, [we] are having the wrong
conversation’, Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand asserts, while
preparing to run for president as the self-appointed avenger of all
self-identified female victims.
This dangerous nonsense denigrates women – we are not all traumatised
by every fool who cops a feel – and questions our claim to equality.

Wendy is a lawyer, author and a former national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Julia Hartley-Brewer says…

The #MeToo campaign is very worrying and will achieve the opposite of
what it pretends to want. The hashtag claims to be about empowering
women to speak out when actually it is turning women into perpetual
victims.

Women who put up with sexual harassment and keep quiet about it for
years, protecting the perpetrators, are hailed as heroines and strong,
powerful feminists. Yet, bizarrely, women who speak out and deal with
sexual harassment forcefully at the time, and then happily move on with
their lives as I and millions of other women have done over the years,
are derided as ‘victim-blamers’ or even ‘rape apologists’. It’s almost
as if a woman is only ‘the right kind of woman’ if she is willing to
play the victim.

This is not what feminism was supposed to be about. It was supposed
to be about empowering women, not infantilising them. Any woman can now
point the finger at any man and make any claim she wants about something
that may – or may not – have happened to her 10 or 20 years ago. That
allegation, whether there is any evidence to back it up or not, is
enough to end a man’s reputation, his career or even his life. We are
seeing an end to the principles of natural justice, innocence until
proven guilty and fair trials.

Make no mistake – this is a witch-hunt, and to hell with any innocent
men who accidentally get caught in the net of the #MeToo outrage.

Julia is a journalist, broadcaster and host at talkRADIO.

Emily Yoffe says…

We should not tolerate sexual harassment. But I am worried that, with
the growing consensus that there should be ‘zero tolerance’ for sexual
harassment, we will make the same mistake regarding the workplace that
we’ve made with other social problems in recent decades. (The concept of
zero tolerance is itself problematic – to oppose it means being accused
of tolerating whatever wrongdoing is under discussion.)

When we apply zero tolerance to a problem, we enlarge what the
problem is and take away the ability of those charged with passing
judgement and meting out fair punishments to weigh the entirety of the
circumstances and tailor a response that brings justice. Instead, too
often judges and school principals, for example, have become rubber
stamps who impose the harshest possible penalties. We should pause
before using this model for sexual harassment.

This is a rare moment in which women and men of good will can work
together to fashion more equitable workplaces. That project is
endangered if we unreasonably expand what we mean by sexual harassment
and then make any accusation of it a trigger for potential career
banishment.

Emily is a journalist and contributing editor at the Atlantic.

Mary Kenny says…

No woman should be coerced into sexual relations – let alone raped –
and moral codes exist for a reason. Yet sexual relations are complex.
Shakespeare wrote: ‘Sometimes from her eyes I did receive fair
speechless messages.’ If we are honest with ourselves, we know how many
layers of complexity there can be in jest, flirtation, a look, a sigh, a
word. Women have often warmed to a touch, a joke, a comment which
implies interest or pursuit. That is not harassment.

Feminism should mean taking responsibility for ourselves and also
standing up for ourselves. Unwanted attention should be dealt with. As
Camille Paglia points out, men are often quite frightened of what women
will say to them – be bold and say it. What is dismaying about current
trends is the tendency to return women to delicate, Victorian damsels
who reach for the smelling salts if they hear a lewd joke. What next –
chaperones?

The novelist Kingsley Amis used to say: ‘Women are trouble – keep
them out of all institutions.’ He was a misogynist, but such notions
will revive if women portray themselves as so fragile that they can’t
deal with the small change of everyday life with robust common sense.

The #MeToo movement has exposed allegations of very serious sexual
crimes and the degree to which women are simply fed up. This is healthy,
up to a point. But we are way past that point.
It has now morphed into a mass hysteria. Men have been accused of
transgressions no reasonable person would define as a crime. And this
crime comes with a swift and terrifying penalty, but has no clear
definition and no statute of limitations. This is juridically and
morally absurd. Nulla poena sine lege.

This crime, it seems, may be committed through word, deed, or even
facial expression. It rests entirely on discerning what a woman feels,
or will feel, even decades later. But discerning this is actually quite
difficult. ‘It’s payback time for men’ is not a reasonable definition.
We must now together reason this out. Nullum crimen sine lege.

The names keep coming. The heads keep rolling. A charge of creepiness is a death sentence. (De minimis non curat lex.)
Once the charge is made, employers race to purge the creep lest they
too be stained by his dishonour. ‘We are deeply disappointed by the
reports that Mister Absolutely Unacceptable in this day and age failed
to live up to our company standards’, begins the ritual. And you know
damned well Mister Absolutely Unacceptable will never get his job, or
his life, back. Audacter caluminiare, semper aliquid haeret.

This is not good for men. But neither is it good for women. Newton’s
third law is not just about physics. There will be a reaction. And women
as a professional class will find themselves figuratively screwed – not
an obvious improvement in the screwing scheme of things.

Claire is a novelist and journalist. Donate towards her new book: Stitch by Stitch.

Cathy Young says…

The post-Harvey Weinstein #MeToo momentum has ended the silence
surrounding sexual abuse committed by a number of wealthy and powerful
men, so it’s difficult not to see a positive side. But it is also
increasingly clear that this cultural moment has turned into an orgy of
female victimhood and the demonisation of men.

Some alleged abusers are being punished with very little evidence;
the announced resignation of Al Franken, the Democratic senator from
Minnesota, has been a wake-up call for many. (One of the eight charges
against Franken was squeezing a woman’s waist while posing for a photo.)

Women are being encouraged to scour their past for experiences that
make them ‘survivors’ – such as a smarmy compliment or a drunken pass
from a colleague. Men are being told to soul-search for past
mistreatment of women. Yet the reality is that there are also male
victims of sexual abuse and female abusers – and when it comes to
low-level hurtful or obnoxious behaviour in the arena of sex and
romance, the sexes are probably just about equal.

Telling women that their lives are a chamber of sexual horrors, and
telling men that they are part of an evil oppressor class, is not the
path to equality.

Due process and the presumption of innocence cannot be forgotten in
our eagerness to embolden women coming forward with allegations of
harassment and sexual assault. There must be a balance between believing
women and ensuring that the lives of innocent people are not destroyed.
My greatest concern is that the #MeToo phenomenon creates a toxic
narrative that casts every male as a potential predator and every female
as a perpetual victim. This can be enormously damaging for women,
particularly young girls who, despite having every advantage and legal
protection in the West, grow up believing they face enormous, perhaps
insurmountable, barriers.

In Australia, women have outnumbered men at university for the past
three decades. But instead of this fact being celebrated, many in the
media continue to portray empowered women as lifelong victims. As
institutionalised forms of discrimination are eliminated, the obsession
with supposed entrenched misogyny deepens – despite all evidence to the
contrary.

Meanwhile, modern feminism all but ignores the plight of the most
oppressed women around the world who are subjugated from the cradle to
the grave.

Rita is a journalist and columnist for the Herald Sun, in Australia.

Joanna Williams says…

‘Sorry, I nearly touched your elbow. I forgot we can’t do that any
more’, he said. ‘You have to ask my permission first’, I replied. We
both laughed.

A social event at the university and, for once, I wasn’t counting the
minutes until I could leave. I was talking to a professor I’d not met
before and it turned out we shared the same views on academia, free
speech and mutual colleagues. I relaxed.

And then the elbow non-incident happened, and an exchange among
equals became a conversation between a woman and an older, more senior,
male colleague. Even laughing about new rules of etiquette prompted
self-consciousness.

One of the worst things about the #MeToo panic is the impact it has
on informal workplace relations. Yes, people still socialise in mixed
groups and colleagues still share confidences behind closed doors. But,
at the same time, a new wariness has taken hold. A voice in our heads
asks how our interactions might be interpreted by others. Is it best to
leave the office door open? Invite a third party along to the lunch
meeting? Under what circumstances can you hug a colleague? Or touch
their elbow?

This self-consciousness robs workplaces of the spontaneous human
warmth that makes having a job bearable. Worse, as colleagues are made
suspicious of each other, we risk turning the clock back on hard-won
sexual equality.

#MeToo has morphed into a campaign that brooks no dissent. Raise
qualms and watch the insults roll. Critics are told they are suffering
from internalised misogyny, are in denial, or are too old to understand
the horrors of leering bosses.

One campaigning commentator, Rosamund Unwin, writes in the Evening Standard
that reactions to harassment post-Weinstein have ‘exposed a
generational divide’. Maybe she is right – I am one of those ‘older
female journalists’ who is concerned at the YouGov survey revealing that
two-thirds of women aged 18 to 24 view wolf-whistling as ‘always or
usually’ being a form of sexual harassment. Twenty-eight per cent see
winking in the same way. Yes, WINKING.

Unwin concludes that my failure ‘to cheer that our sex finally feels
able to speak out’ is due to a ‘lack of empathy’ among the over-40s. She
speculates that such indifference is because ‘some women perhaps feel
they owe part of their success to being the female in the room who
wasn’t difficult, who laughed at the boys’ “jokes”’.

These sorts of accusations are galling, especially for those of us
who have spent years metaphorically kicking sex pests in the balls and
fighting for women to be treated as equals in the workplace. I shouldn’t
have to resort to personal anecdotes. However, as #MeToo confers
credibility on those who declare themselves victims, I have felt
pressure to reveal my own slew of nasty sexual experiences, as evidence
that I’m not some traitor to the cause.

How ironic that #MeToo is fuelling its own bullying climate: women
are told to conform, or else. This climate is a greater threat to real
freedom than any pathetic groper.

#MeToo has been hailed as a revelatory moment. But the truth is,
there’s little new about this obsession with phantom sexual-harassment
epidemics. #MeToo might have been spurred on by news of a fat old perv
in Hollywood, but the feminist narrative of victimised women has been
around for a long time.

And screw it – I won’t say that there’s anything good about #MeToo.
You don’t need to celebrate a hashtag to understand that sexual abuse
and rape are wrong. Neither do you need a social-media movement to have
the guts to stand up to any guy who crosses the line. I’m sick of women
feeling that they have to caveat every political criticism of this
victim culture with the line: ‘Of course I believe that rape and sexual
assault is bad, but…’

#MeToo is a craven attack on women’s liberation, spurred on by
middle-class journos, fame-hungry politicians and virtue-signalling
celebrities. Normal, working-class women don’t get a look-in. We’re the
wrong kind of women, you see, because we refuse to be patronised by such
fainting-couch nonsense – and because most of us will know that being a
‘survivor’ takes more than having your knee touched.

I want to live in a world where women feel empowered to take life by
the balls. So no, I won’t join in the #MeToo choir. This patronising,
illiberal assault on sexual freedom is #NotMe.

Saturday, 15 July 2017

Bettina Arndt presents a live Q&A with the fabulous Karen Straughan,
the best known female activist for men’s rights. Karen, also known as
GirlWritesWhat, is one of the most popular women working for the men’s
movement. She has more than 160,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel
and her 2011 vlog on "Feminism and the Disposable Male" video has almost
1.5 million views.

Saturday, 1 July 2017

When
it comes to sexual equity in the workplace, the biggest “gender gap” of
all is the fact that men suffer around 92% of all job-related
fatalities.

According to
Bureau of Labor statistics
from 1992-2014, women laborers accounted for 43% of total hours worked,
yet they suffered a scant 8% of workplace fatalities. In what world
could this possibly be considered respectful of women’s endless quest
for equality?

We still hear about the “wage gap” almost daily, and even though it’s a
myth, we should still marshal our resources to rectify this imaginary injustice. Yet no one is willing to stand tall and address the fact that selfish men are robbing female workers of the right to die on the job at a ridiculously unfair rate of almost thirteen to one. This disgracefully unjust pattern persists all over the world—
in Australia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and even Canada,
a nation so uniquely fixated on social justice at all costs, it’ll eventually bankrupt them.

The
sad, inequitable truth is that when it comes to jobs that actually kill
you—noble working-class professions such as logging, fishing, roofing,
mining, truck driving, and toiling away on electrical power lines—men
unfairly comprise
more than 90%
of the workers in each profession. Conversely, women dominate some of
the safest jobs—things such as administrative support, education, and
library work—by a factor of around three to one.

It is shameful
and horrifying and totally problematic and completely unacceptable that
gender activists have failed to address this gaping inequality. It’s
almost as if the patriarchy intentionally denies women the natural
privilege of dying while working.

Women have been making strides
toward equality in every aspect of the American workplace except for the
jobs that actually kill you. The ladies simply aren’t dying on the job
nearly as frequently as men do, and this savage inequity needs to be
addressed. It behooves us as radical egalitarians to remove all the
barriers that prevent women from performing deadly work.

This
savage imbalance is, of course, based on patriarchal tropes such as the
idea that women don’t have enough “upper body strength” to lift logs and
shovel coal. We’ve been led to believe destructive and damaging myths
about women being “fragile” and “emotional” and “living longer” and
“having the law on their side” and “enjoying the legal and societal
presumption of innocence in any dispute involving a male.” We even hear
the easily debunked and totally discredited idea that “there are some
jobs women just won’t do.” We must explode these harmful myths as we
push ourselves blindly and self-righteously off a cliff toward equality.

The “glass coffin” is a term coined by graphic designer Kevin Slaughter
to describe the fact that women haven’t quite “broken through” toward
equality when it comes to working jobs that can kill you. Sure, we often
hear about the impermeable “glass ceiling” that prevents women from
becoming CEOs and billionaires and Supreme Court justices and running for president,
but our male-dominated society turns a deaf ear to women’s righteous
quest for equality when it comes to sharing the right to suffocate under
a ten-ton tsunami of human waste while working in a sewer because
that’s supposedly a “man’s” job.

We live in a sexist society that patronizes women and sends
hurtful messages that they aren’t “tough” enough to lose their lives on
the job. Equality is for everyone, and that includes the right to get
squashed like a bug by heavy machinery. Why aren’t women afforded the
right to be struck dead by falling objects? Didn’t Susan B. Anthony
struggle nobly to make it possible for the sisterhood to drown overboard
on Alaskan crabbing expeditions? Women have the same right that men do
to be crushed to death in a coal-mining explosion. They deserve the
freedom and dignity to be pulverized into tomato paste when their semi
truck jackknifes around a mountain curve.

Enough posturing. Now is
the time for action. Now is the time for women to face all the
real-life danger that true equality brings. They’ve shrieked for two
generations about how they aren’t the “weaker sex.” Now it is time for
them to prove it. It is time for women to put their noses to the
grindstone, even if that means getting their hair caught in the
grindstone and being strangled to death by it.

As a forward-thinking nation of workers who have more genders than Baskin-Robbins has ice-cream flavors, we must rectify systematic inequities that permit women to suffer lower unemployment rates than men. We must no longer permit a sexist climate that forces women all across the globe to suffer life’s miseries longer than men do.

In order to reach the equality they understandably seek, it
is obvious that women must start dying equally. Silence equals death—for
dudes, at least. Death equality NOW!!! Close the Death Gap NOW!!! Let
us raise our hammers and sickles—ladies, if they’re too heavy to lift,
that’s OK, because we’ll help—and SMASH the Glass Coffin! It’s time to
shout loudly for Gender Death Equality in the workplace.

Women workers of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your lives!

Wednesday, 21 June 2017

This may be the best ever all-in-one introduction to Sargon of Akkad
I’ve encountered - his explanations of meme politics,
Pepe The Frog, Kekistan, the phenomena of trolling, social justice and
the state of liberalism in the 21st century are excellent, extremely
clear and informative.

Wednesday, 15 March 2017

“The
biggest threat to free speech is that WE are actively silencing
OURSELVES, not that the government is silencing us….The outrage machine
will just dull us all down to the point where we won’t share ANY
original thought because we won’t want to deal with the repercussions.You think I’m being alarmist here? Well, do we seem more politically correct or less politically correct than 5 years ago? What about 10 years ago? Do you find yourself censoring yourself more or less
now than even last year? Who is forcing you to censor yourself? Is it
the government? I don’t think so.And guess what, this creep of stifling speech for fear of being
ostracized isn’t going to magically reverse itself: we have to
pro-actively fight it. And we should have started this a long time ago.”

The Librarian

“I have no doubt that, someday, the distortion of truth by the radical feminists of our time will be seen to have been the greatest intellectual crime of the second half of the twentieth century. At the present time, however, we still live under the aegis of that crime, and calling attention to it is an act of great moral courage” - Professor Howard S. Schwartz, of Oakland University in Michigan, USA, 2001